Customer Focus

AWS customers will play a significant role in the conference whether they are running their own sessions or participating in AWS sessions.

Amazon plans to shed some additional light on its Amazon Web Servicesthe company's cloud computing platformduring its first-ever user conference. The re:Invent conference, which will run Nov. 27 through 29 at Las Vegas' Venetian casino and resort, will host AWS customers from around the world in a gathering of customers, partners, developers and others that make up the AWS ecosystem, Adam Selipsky, vice president of marketing, sales, product management and support at AWS, told eWEEK. "We're very excited to be holding our first global user and partner conference at the end of November in Las Vegas," Selipsky said. "It's something we've talked about for a number of years and had strong demand from customers and partners." The event will be done in the Amazon waywith a focus on the customer, he said. "We're trying to put this conference together in an Amazonian and AWS fashion, in that we're trying to put our customers first," said Selipsky. "We're going to feature a lot of customers. We've got customer speakers such as Tom Soderstrom, the CIO of NASA's JPL [Jet Propulsion Lab]; Reed Hastings from Netflix; and old-time AWS startup stalwarts like Don MacAskill from SmugMug. He's been with us from the very beginninga private beta customer of S3 [Amazon Simple Storage Service] in early 2006."

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.